Anthony Minghella. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
News that the film director and BFI chairman Anthony Minghella has died suddenly at the age of 54, has stunned his friends, family and colleagues.
The first anyone reportedly sensed something being wrong was on Friday when he failed to attend a private screening for his latest film, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. That night he was taken to hospital for reported tonsillitis. A close associate of his told me that little more is known, other than that Anthony Minghella always worked himself punishingly hard, and poured himself emotionally into every project.
The news sent me back to look at the famous picture of Tony Blair greeting Noel Gallagher at the legendary Cool Britannia party at Downing Street in 1997. There, in the background, in a drink-holding group and looking on with amused politeness, is Minghella. (Nine years later, he was to direct a Labour Party broadcast featuring a revealingly tense "conversation" between Blair and Gordon Brown.) I wonder if the director and writer in him might have relished the drama and even the buried poignancy of the Blair/Gallagher meeting: two white-hot reputations that were destined to fizzle almost immediately.
Minghella had recently won a best director Oscar for The English Patient and was at the party as a representative of the movies - a medium in which New Labour took more of an interest than any British administration in history. But he was also, I think, a representative of the "arts", a more stolid constituency than the super-trendy Britpop with which Labour was infatuated. But it was Minghella, with his muscular intelligence and cool unshowiness, whose reputation continued to advance, while the rockers and the spin-doctors burned themselves out.
I met Minghella for the first and only time at the Berlin film festival five years ago. It was around the time he made Cold Mountain, and he met me for a drink at the Hyatt Hotel in the Marlene Dietrich Platz.
He was one of those rare people who, though extremely powerful in the industry, was not well known to the public. Yet in person he had as much vibrant physical presence as any star. Minghella looked powerful with a bullish, almost shaven head. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine him in a circus strongman's outfit. The sheer concentration of his attention on you - coupled with an easy calm - was pretty unnerving, although he was courtesy itself. I had a sense of something a journalist rarely gets: what it might be like to be directed by him. He would give any actor the benefit of his formidable intelligence, though heaven help you, I surmised, if you showed up on set late or without your lines learnt.
Our conversation somehow strayed onto the subject of self-image and self-knowledge, and how none of us can quite perceive the truth about ourselves and our behaviour. Minghella said to me: "There is a saying: 'If nine Russians tell you you are drunk - lie down'."
The massive success of The English Patient in 1996 was what made Minghella a blue-chip name in the film world, but I first became aware of him with his first movie, a film I liked and continue to like, though it has become much sneered at for supposed emotional luvviness: Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), starring Juliet Stevenson as the woman whose husband (Alan Rickman) has died suddenly and almost inexplicably - that fact alone gives me pause now - and then comes back as a benign phantom to watch over her. The film was spoken of as the "British Ghost" although I don't think Ghost has anything to touch the raw and real pain of Stevenson's angry and despairing monologue to her therapist. ("I miss him, I miss him, I miss him...")
A Hollywood movie, Mr Wonderful, followed, but the directorial big time arrived with The English Patient in 1996, which showed he could handle something with sweep and scope: and with Kristin Scott Thomas's death scene in the cave, Minghella hit the audience's emotional buttons with laser-guided accuracy and force.
Three years later came another big success, The Talented Mr Ripley, a Patricia Highsmith adaptation about the dysfunction and delusion that is necessary for all confidence-tricksters - the delusion that is perhaps simply an extreme version of the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach that drives all men in their careers. Very well acted, it made a star of the beautiful young Jude Law and cemented the reputation of up-and-comer Philip Seymour Hoffman.
From there, it was Cold Mountain (2003), another big sweeping romance, but one which for my money failed to ignite, as the lovers (Jude Law and Nicole Kidman) were apart for so much screen time. His parable of rich and poor in London, Breaking And Entering (2006), was not widely liked, but I thought it was a stylish, good-looking movie, elegantly composed.
And all this, before the age of 54, with loads more producer credits besides, including Iris, The Quiet American and Michael Clayton - and more work forthcoming, including his The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, written by Richard Curtis, and a planned version of Liz Jensen's novel The Ninth Life Of Louis Drax.
His work-rate was awe-inspiring, as was his penetrative intelligence as a director, his creativity as a writer, and his fierce commitment to supporting and promoting British film.
With his passing, cultural life in this country has descended one or two IQ points.
